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All I Really Need to Know I Learned When I Embraced My Asexuality
“Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup:
The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.” — All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, a poem by Robert Fulghum
Chances are that if you grew up in the USA you’ve read or heard the poem All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Maybe you’ve seen it on Facebook, reshared by your aunt next to recipes for lemon squares. Or maybe you’ve heard it read out loud at a banquet as something inspirational and been unsure if the speaker really meant what they were saying or if they just weren’t good at writing their own speech. It’s possible that you have heard it spoken by a valedictorian at your high school graduation as you sat there fidgeting and sweating, wishing that these speeches were more interesting to listen to. Or every time it’s came up, you tuned it out completely and my bringing it up is the first you’ve heard or seen of it in years. Maybe this is the first you’ve ever heard of the poem and you’re wondering where I’m going with this.
Published in 1990, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten is a poem written by Robert Fulghum that captures how similar being a child can be to being an adult. For as different as it can feel to be a kid, the truth is parents are also guessing their way through everything and just trying not to show it, and those fundamentals of how we learn to socialize on the playground are relevant in childhood and also all the way through our adult lives.
I grew up with this poem as a poster on my parent’s living room wall. It was laid out underneath a too-perfect picture of a macintosh apple, the font making it look like it had been scrawled there instead of typed. I don’t know why we had this as a poster. My mom worked in a middle school, so I thought maybe she had been gifted it in the same way sometimes people gave teachers “world’s best teacher” mugs. Maybe she bought it herself at the office supply store she sometimes dragged me along to, full of classroom decorations and notebooks that the school could never be bothered to supply themselves. Whatever the case, it was on our wall for most of my life. When I was bored, I’d sit in the living room and stare into space and, when the TV or my book stopped being amusing, I’d reread the poem. Then I’d spin around in our spinning chair, stopping myself on the wall, and turn back to read it again until I had it memorized.
I didn’t know at the time that it was something I’d hear read by my band director at a banquet years later, or that that was not the only time I would hear it referenced in a speech at some event meant to honor some achievement. I dont know if that’s what the poet had in mind when he wrote it, and I doubt that it was originally intended as some big commercial success; the popularity of the poem seemed, to me, like a happy accident. There are a lot of truths in it, as simple as it is. If you have never read Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, I’d like to ask you to take a moment and give it a once-over. It’s linked at the top and it is a very easy read. Maybe it’ll even give you something to think about — nostalgia for when the world seemed as easy as playing fair and sharing your toys, maybe. Or maybe its life lessons will feel applicable now, too, even if you’re trying and failing to pay all your bills and dinner is about to boil over in the other room but you just wanted to quickly read this blog post before you told your family it’s time to eat. (Thank you; please check on the macaroni.)
Over the years I’ve thought a lot about the line about the paper cup. Thinking about how we are all like the little plant in the paper cup makes me consider my own existence in the greater garden of life. I find myself feeling nostalgic, as if my life has been both longer and shorter than it is. Maybe it’s because at some point make-believe stopped being as much fun and we stopped yelling at whoever wasn’t pushing the merry-go-round fast enough and, for better or worse, grew up. Maybe it’s because the world never felt as simple or straightforward to me as the world the poem describes, even when I was five years old. Or maybe it’s because I never felt like the other plants in their paper cups.
Have you ever grown roses? Or had a mint plant on your window sill? Maybe you were gifted an orchid and tried your best to keep it alive even though you had no idea how to care for orchids, or maybe you tried your best to plant a vegetable garden before realizing how much work it was when you were ten and going back inside, exhausted and covered in dirt. Every seed planted looks the same at first, every flower pot full of rich soil waiting to be watered and cared for and sat by the window with the most sun. With the right care, it goes from being a little paper cup with dirt to a plant sucking up sunlight and expanding into the dirt until you have to move it to a pot to give it more room, or maybe eventually the front yard, if you have one. They all produce leaves and seeds and, depending on the seeds, bloom, each opening up exactly when they’re meant to. We all recognize that plants are different from each other and will bloom at different times and no one knows why, but we’re not nearly as good at recognizing that in each other.
I was never referred to as a “late bloomer” growing up. The term is used often to describe someone who hasn’t hit puberty at the expected time, or who has seemed to hit puberty but hasn’t taken an interest in sex or sexual activities. I’ve heard it said to many of my ace friends when told that they would meet the right person or that their sexual orientation was something that needed fixed. The phrase was not used on me growing up because I took care to make myself appear to not be ace, fearing deep down something was wrong with me.
For a long time, it worked. My little plant on the window sill grew into beautiful red flowers, opening up as I nurtured them. I was holding up my paper cup and yelling, “look at my flowers! Look how pretty they are! I’ve taken care of them so well, don’t you think? Doesn’t my plant look so good next to yours?” Then I’d set it down next to me, proud of my handiwork, glad that no one around me could see the paper flowers I’d glued to the stems. I painted the roses red because I wanted to match the garden. I wanted my little paper cup to look like the other plants around me, to not be out of place, to just fit in — even if it meant painstakingly crafting paper flowers, carefully propping up the stems, trying to get everything just right so that no one noticed I didn’t have flowers of my own.
As we got older and moved from paper cups to pots, I began to have a harder time gluing on flowers and of no one noticing what I was doing. I didn’t have dead stems to trim in the same way. I didn’t need as much water. I began to use nail polish instead of paint; anything to make my plant looked like it belonged in the garden. Every now and then I noticed other plants that didn’t have flowers or that had flowers that were wilted as if they weren’t getting enough water and sunlight. As we all moved on to bigger pots and outside, I noticed that sunlight didn’t help my leaves stop from wilting. Water didn’t help. Nor did shelter from sunlight, or trimming off dead bits. After a while, the only thing that I had going for me was my paper flowers, and they were beginning to fall apart.
The thing with plants is, like people, we don’t just grow down into the dirt and up into the sunlight; we also have particular needs so that we can thrive. You can’t spend your whole life pretending that your tree is a tomato plant, that your corn is a soybean, or that an orchid is the same thing as a cactus. You can lie to yourself and everyone else and if you’re very good at it, you can make one seem like the other and convince yourself and everyone else — or you can at least try. But no matter what you do or how persuasive you are, you can’t spend your whole life painting the roses red or gluing paper flowers onto a wilting stalk. At some point, it catches up to you and you realize that you’ve been nurturing yourself in a way that’s actually hurting you and the lie you’ve constructed does what it was always going to do; it falls apart.
When I was about 23, I stopped gluing on the paper flowers. I didn’t have a plan. I just hoped that no one around me minded. As the weight of the years of painting and repainting and glue fell away without my maintaining it, I found that there was still me underneath. I was still there, in the garden, and I wasn’t being uprooted. Some asked me where the flowers went and were upset when I told them I’d been gluing them on my whole life. Others understood, telling me they’d stopped gluing on flowers too. As it turned out a lot of us were desperate to fit in and were tired of what we had to do to get there; we just wanted sunlight.
I’m not a ‘late bloomer’. This is me. I am ace. I am demisexual and graysexual, two terms housed underneath the asexual umbrella. I am, like everyone else, like the little plant in the styrofoam cup, growing and maturing and finding where I belong in the larger garden we call life. My leaves are healing; I am stretching towards the sun.
Elle here! I just wanted to say a big thanks to my patrons and readers for your support in making posts like this possible; thank you. If you’d like to help me write more keep the lights on and keep writing, consider supporting me on Patreon, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or share this blog with your friends and foes on social media. You can follow me on TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and subscribe to my channel on YouTube if you’d like. You can also contact me directly at secretladyspider@gmail.com — I do interviews about demisexuality, asexuality, ADHD, and disability, and more! I also just like it when people say hi. To take a look at my publications, interviews I’ve done for media, podcasts, and keep up to date with new stuff, check out my linktree. Again, thank you for reading my words; it means the world to me. Have an amazing day!
